On the eight hour train
ride back to Vermont from S17, the 1st anniversary of
Occupy Wall St, I had plenty of time to fume about the generally
dismissive press coverage of the event, though between us and the
police (but mostly the police), we had created a good deal of traffic
slowdown in the financial district if not the actual stoppage we had
hoped for.
Pundits keep writing that
Occupy is dead and why didn't we work to get people elected to
Congress who would further our agenda like the Tea Party did. As if
it was the same old same old about getting power and then using it to
get what your special interest group wants. Did anybody ever stop to
think that Occupy isn't doing this because we don't want to? Yes
folks, Occupy is not about your hierarchical power trip game of
seeing who can get the most influence in Congress. In fact, Occupy is
hardly about politics at all. We're just not interested in electing
people to public office. Occupy is much broader and more radical than
that, nothing short of rethinking our social structure, our value
system and the we relate to one another and the planet.
To understand Occupy, you
have to understand Occupy culture. It's pretty clear from the way
Occupy culture coalesced fairly rapidly amongst a few hundred people
camped out in a park that the ideas behind it have been brewing for
awhile. Of course, you say, utopian ideas about a freer, more just
and loving world are nothing new. Some of them have even managed to
get a fair amount of traction before hardening into totalitarianism
or contracting into inward looking communities that soon evaporate
into the general population. What do we hope to accomplish? Except
that something else is happening to human culture right now that
might make all the difference in the world. That profound change is
the Digital Revolution, the biggest thing to hit human social
organization in the last 10,000 years.
To understand why this is
so, here's a long complicated story very briefly....Human beings
evolved in fairly small social groups and it is in fairly small face
to face social groups that we function best and most morally. Recent
research by social scientists, especially the relatively new science
of behavioral economics, suggests that we are wired to be
cooperative, most (but not all) of us are team players and we are
blessed with an innate sense of social justice. For a very very long
time there weren't very many of us. And then, for reasons outside the
scope of this discussion, the applecart was upset by exponential
population growth, pressure on resources and the problem of how to
get things done in a orderly way in the midst of very large
populations. All this set the stage for the development of new social
structures, hierarchical, stratified and unequal.
Archeologists have
discovered something very interesting about stratified societies, and
that is that even very early on, the culture of elites was more
alike across political and ethnic boundaries than it was like that of
the people they ruled. This is still true and it's because, with
more access to resources and control of the flow of resources, the
relatively small group of elites was much better able to communicate
with one another across space. Those lower on the social totem pole
got their information from above, but were mostly unable to share
information broadly in a horizontal direction. In hierarchical
societies, information and goods flow up and down between elites and
masses within political boundaries (wealth mostly flows up), but back
and forth between elites across political boundaries.
The problem with this
structure is that all the safety checks on the proliferation of
pathological behavior by rogue humans developed in small face to face
societies. They rely on people knowing what other people are doing
and punishing non-team player behavior before it proliferates and
destroys group cohesion. “Had a good day hunting, did you? Killed
that big buck? You haven't forgotten about your village mates and how
much we all depend on each other, have you? Because if you have,
we'll be dropping by to remind you.” In large stratified societies,
these mechanisms fall apart, largely because communication is
fragmented and controlled at key points by individuals in the
hierarchy. So maybe you can see how radical changes in communication
could allow for radical changes in structure.
Much of Occupy culture is
in fact very old culture. It is pre-stratified culture. It still
hangs out in our brains because it is “normal” human culture. We
have an idea that sharing is good. But we also have an idea that
accumulating is good. These two competing cultural values (old and
new) exist side by side and somehow find their separate expressions
in the way we conduct our lives. Occupy would argue that the newer
values are the non-team player values proliferated by an elite who
are pathological accumulators. These individuals, having gotten
control of the pathways of communication, teach their values to
others. Humans, being very teachable (learning and sharing ideas is
after all what we do best), have been good students. The doctrine of
accumulation now permeates world culture.
If you have been to an
Occupy General Assembly and have observed the strange rituals there,
you will have an idea of Occupy culture. If you have been to an
Occupy action and have observed the place flooded with cell phones,
cameras and microphones, you will have an idea of how Occupy culture
is evolving in the midst of the Digital Revolution.
Cultural Value 1: There
are no leaders. No, really, there are no leaders. Like in a small
scale society, there are task specific leaders, people that others
defer to because they have the time, energy or good ideas to get
things done, but these can change in a flash, as some other talented,
committed person steps up to do the job. Occupy's unfailing
commitment to equality makes for some tedious discussions and
constant nervous questioning as to whether “everybody is OK with
this”. And yes, in the midst of situations where rapid action is
required, dedication to nobody hogging the decision-making process
can lead to a bit of confusion. Or a lot of confusion. Occupy wants
everybody to have a voice. Not everybody may like your idea, but at
least you'll have a chance to express it. And we will politely
listen, twinkling our fingers in the air to show our support. Or we
may actually have differences of opinion, in which case it may take a
long time or never to get anything done. Not unlike the U. S.
Congress.
There are a couple of
good things about no leaders. It makes it less likely that anyone
will accumulate power, which deters pathological wealth accumulators.
Also, in a movement which might expect to be harassed or even
persecuted by the powers that be, it prevents co-option through
corruption of leaders as well as attempts to destroy the movement by
picking off the leadership. Someone compared trying to destroy Occupy
by destroying its leaders to broom multiplication in “The
Sorcerer's Apprentice”. Or, as someone more colorfully expressed it
in a sign at Zuccotti Park, “Screw Us and We Multiply”.
Cultural Value 2:
Horizontal Organization. Oddly, in a movement composed largely of
technologically savvy younger people, the basis for Occupy
organization is small, face to face community groups who meet in real
space, not cyberspace. These groups approximate the band
organization that feels comfortable to humans. There are hundreds of
such Occupy groups across the U.S. and in many other countries. They
are autonomous decision-making units and are working on local
problems. These groups are linked horizontally through the internet,
a huge receptacle of bubbling ideas where nobody calls the shots but
where ideas that appeal to people catch on and spread practically
instantaneously. It remains to be seen whether wisdom will be found
in this decision-making by crowd popularity. It presumes a good deal
of capable thinking by individual humans, and that they will, if
having followed bad suggestions and suffered bad consequences, learn
to make better choices. No such confidence has ever before been
placed in the decision-making ability of the general public by our
hierarchical systems, where it is usually assumed that “father
knows best”.
How does horizontal
organization work if you need to get lots of real people together in
real space to get something done? Theoretically very easily now that
large numbers of people can communicate rapidly with each other via
cell phone, texting and Twitter. In practice, it took about an hour
to get 150 people together for a not previously planned action during
the September 17 anniversary, including a couple of false starts, a
period of time which seemed way too long. I have a feeling that this
will improve rapidly with rapidly changing technology.
How can resources move,
if not up and down the hierarchy? Right now we get resources where we
need them mostly by paying resources (money) up the hierarchy, and
then having the hierarchy make decisions about allocating them out to
where they're needed. There is some entropy involved with this, not
to mention outright graft. If oil companies had to appeal directly to
the American people for subsidies, how much do you suppose they would
get? If you are making billions in profit, could you really make a
case for donations? Yet amazingly millions of dollars sent up the
hierarchy by Americans end up as subsidies to oil companies.
Direct funding of large
projects on a big scale has been made much easier by the internet
(for example Kickstarter) but it's still in it's infancy. Undoubtedly
there will be a lot of problems still to work out.
I imagine that looking at
Occupy's issues, conservatives may assume these are a bunch of
liberals and therefore “big government” people. That would be a
wrong assumption. Occupiers are not big government people. They are
“very little government” people. But before those of you wishing
to get away with making totally unregulated fortunes at everybody
else's expense start jumping on the Occupy bandwagon, you should know
that Occupy has a plan to prevent you from doing that. It's called:
Cultural Value 3:
Transparency. At S17, marching along on the sidewalk, listening
to the band playing “When the Saints Come Marching In” with
confetti in my hair, everybody in a generally festive mood, I spied a
couple of policemen wading into the crowd, I moved back a bit, then
there was a gasp from the crowd, a thud as a body hit the sidewalk,
the crowd surged backwards and then regrouped around the person being
handcuffed. Everybody started chanting Shame! Shame! The whole world
is watching! And with about a bizillion cameras, cell phones and
video cameras aimed at the police, the whole world was watching. It
only took a few days for photos and videos of many illegal arrests
and unnecessarily harsh police activity to flood the internet.
Occupy is committed to
openness in what it does (and whether or not people in the movement
are being sufficiently open can be a point of contention) but more
generally, it is committed to exposing anybody who tries to scam the
system or dominate others. The new model for social control is not
that Big Brother is watching you. It's that everybody is watching
you. And there is a moral component to this—You should be ashamed
of your behavior. This is the social control of the small scale
society on a very large scale, possible only now because reality is
so easy to capture and communicate rapidly to others. The generation
growing up with social media seems comfortable with a degree of
social exposure similar to that of a village where your neighbors
know what you're up to most of the time. How can we balance this kind
of social control with respect for people's privacy?
Cultural Value 4: I'm OK,
You're OK. Occupy people are a highly individualistic lot who
value creativity. Occupy's creativity is one of it's greatest
strengths. Occupy people like drama, they like costumes, they like
music and they like art. Chalk is a lot of fun. We're a movement that
just keeps coming up with new, inventive and cheap ways to get our
message out. Because we value creativity, Occupy tries very hard to
respect individual differences. In Occupy, different behavior is
creative behavior, and creative behavior is potentially a solution to
a problem. Sometimes Occupy tries so hard to respect individual
differences that it is almost comical, but we take it seriously
because we know it's important. This too is a value of many small
scale societies, where people depend on other people and if you are
merely different, but not harmful to the group, an effort is made
create an acceptable social role for you. People power is too
valuable a resource to waste when you don't have very many people.
Under these circumstances, where people are more accepting of a wide
range of individual differences, there is less need for privacy.
Cultural Value 5: Greed
is bad. At the heart of Occupy culture is a rejection of the
worship of wealth. When Occupy talks about CEOs making billions of
dollars, they aren't talking about the need for a new law that takes
away rich people's money and gives it to poor people as some sort of
convenient way to move money around and solve the problem of poverty.
They are talking about morality, that people who make that much
money should be ashamed, that this is a kind of pathological hoarding
behavior and that people who have this problem don't need a new law,
they need an intervention. Real humans care about other humans, feel
empathy and realize we are all in this together. They are team
players. Occupy groups, though they themselves have little resources,
are involved in a lot of activities at the community level that
involve giving things away---free food, free stuff, free services.
This isn't because they think that people shouldn't have to work for
things, it's an educational and spiritual exercise in letting go of
materialism and valuing people over profit. Occupy groups are working
hard to educate people that life is just not all about money. In this
respect Occupy is stepping in to fill a moral void left by many
modern churches who have seemingly contracted their notion of
morality to include only regulating other peoples' sex lives. Occupy
has received support from courageous faith leaders who are bucking
this trend, some of whom were among the first arrested at the S17
action.
Cultural Value 6:
Use=Ownership. A long time ago and in small scale societies,
people's idea of ownership was tied to the relationship they had to
the thing owned. Later people developed an abstract idea of ownership
in which a person could own something they didn't use and could
extract resources from others for the privilege of using it, a
concept that would have seemed nonsensical to people for most of
human history.
Occupy is fond of talking
about the People's this and that. This doesn't mean that everything
should belong to something nebulous called the People, which might
devolve into belonging to a few people called the State. It means
that this is something lots of (actual) people use, and therefore it
is owned by lots of (actual) people. Worker owned businesses make a
lot of sense in Occupy culture. Things everybody needs and uses, like
water, roads or healthcare, should belong to everybody. This means
that everybody should have responsibility for their cost and
maintenance, and everybody should be able to use them. One person
owning six houses doesn't make sense in Occupy culture, nor does
thousands of vacant houses owned by banks who don't maintain them,
while people who could maintain them are homeless.
Cultural Value 7: Another
World is Possible. So where are all the issues, all the demands?
Occupy has a lot of issues and many of them are similar to issues and
demands of established “liberal” groups, but Occupy is neither
politically liberal nor politically conservative. Occupy encompasses
people of widely varying political ideologies, and working things out
in the midst of this will tax Occupy's culture of respect for all and
giving all a voice to the extreme. The saving grace of Occupy culture
will be a reliance on small group dynamics at the community level,
where people of different backgrounds and viewpoints have to work
together in face to face situations. Just like in the ancient
village, in Occupy culture, people are too precious a resource to
write off.
As the generally festive
Occupy marchers encircled the financial district on S17, this despite
brutal police harassment, the guys in suits looking down on us were
neither laughing at us, nor with us. They looked worried, as well
they should be, because there is no room for elitism in Occupy
culture. But should they be worried that something bad will happen to
them? No. Occupy is revolutionary, but it's not the kind of
revolution you think of when you think about one group wanting to
take power away from another group. It's a revolution of the heart
and mind.
The police repression
Occupy continues to experience is a bad strategy for those in power
to pursue. We chanted “We are the 99%, you are the 99%” to the
police, because we want to include these hard working Americans in
the movement, but it's hard to watch officers who are supposed to be
protecting citizens bloody the faces of peaceful unarmed people and
not dislike them. Intended to intimidate, brutality just makes people
who value justice angrier and more determined.
And Occupy is full of people
who value justice.
My advice is to just lay
off. Maybe Occupy is only another idealistic movement that will
evaporate. Or maybe it really is a harbinger of the shape of human
societies post-Digital Revolution, where we will return to structures
with which we feel comfortable and within which we can be our most
human and most moral. Would that be so bad?
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